By Kent Bergeron
Pastor at All Saints Reformed Church, a CREC mission Church
Edited and published with permission from the author.
I spend most of my week thinking about the Liturgy over the Sermon. I have recently been thinking more about parishioners daily liturgical habits, reflecting on the wisdom of the Fathers. Actually, we don’t have to reinvent this stuff. It’s all been done for us in all traditions except mainstream Evangelicalism.
Consider, Christian spirituality is something deeply shaped by the habits, customs, and rhythms of a particular tradition, where faith is cultivated through embodied practices that root us in the life of Christ and His people. These practices—whether rich or sparse—form the soil in which our religious affections grow. They can either cultivate deep devotion and a sense of belonging or lead to shallowness and or disconnection. I believe there is a large number of young men who experience both.
This is a quick observation, and it’s an “if the shoe fits” observation as well. In the absence of intentional disciplined liturgical practices, what absolutely will develop is fragmentation within the Church, leaving many unsure of our identity as the unified Body of Christ. That’s a primary emphasis of the Scriptures. This fragmentation is so very evident in the modern evangelical world, where a culture of celebrity pastors, conference-driven worship, and trend-chasing has disrupted- no - it has replaced the steady, intentional rhythms of the Church. That stuff grows a particular Church, but it doesn’t develop a people.
Removing the emphasis from the Eucharist (which is the Sacrament which God has given that not only testifies but with baptism creates the One Body) to the “Sermon-Word” alone has turned the priest of God and his people into the 'rock star' celebrity pastor we see popularized today. This is the unfortunate fruit of revivalism and popularized by men like Whitefield. The evangelical conference circuit, with its cult of personality, breeds a culture of superficiality. Priestly work of the Church is not neutral; our larger pop-culture reflects it. It’s a place where the focus shifts quickly from one hot topic to another as we see for example on social media, particularly X, from one controversy to the next (these men are there), creating a rapid pace of information and emotion but offering little in terms of rooted spiritual formation. This marketing-driven environment may keep people engaged for a time, but it leaves them scattered, unsure of the depth of their faith or the unity of the Church - and the two go together.
What our habits are (or lack thereof) is what cultivates good or bad. The Church Fathers’ wise pastoral care understood this. They did have times where wonderful sermons were preached together - such as the Feast of Lights - Epiphany, which became an occasion for great preachers to preach great sermons especially in Constantinople. But their primary work was grounded in good liturgical systems for God’s people emphasizing daily prayer and the Word and Sacrament as priority.
They developed good Biblical systems and habits, daily and weekly and annual exercises, habits, and celebrations is what they believed established Godly unified people and created Godly customs with the Sacraments as primary. Example - the Calendar was not neutral to them - that’s where you get our tradition of gathering on the Lord’s Day. If this were a book, I’d have a chapter on how they viewed liturgy as catechetical not only memorizing a list of propositions, but the whole man doing worship in a Biblical format that created the kind of person that creates good Christian society.
Also, as a slight digression, good government comes from good Christian society. Not the other way around. We Theonomy types emphasize the wrong thing. We don’t have the primary stuff down for good Christian government. Society operates as a single unit. Government has to coerce a people who are not unified ergo more law and policing. Sound familiar? We created it - the fragmentation by ignoring the Eucharist and Hebrews 10 tells us that when we treat the Blood of Christ as common then we have trampled Christ when we were supposed to be trampling devils, (thank you Chrysostom).
Good simple and small government can be established without government coercive power when a people are One. And for a Christian society to operate as a single unit, the Eucharist is central because that is what it creates. And this sphere model of authority is silly. I don’t even know how you can even discuss a sphere model in the American Church landscape - what state government authority would take this kind of a fragmented Church serious? See Covid. The Church is not another authority beside other authorities. It is the very place where heaven and earth meet and overlap, and it creates Christian society. It is the central place where the heart of God’s People reside, and this shores up and permeates every facet of society. Government is a temporary necessity because of sin. It is God appointed, but law is transformative as is our salvation, and in the eschaton, perfected put back right (justified) people do not need law. The point is Godly priestly ministers create good society and not rock star pastors. End of digression.
Paul’s rebuke in 1 Corinthians speaks directly to this problem: the Corinthian church was fractured by their obsession with individual leaders, turning the gospel into a series of competing brands instead of a unified message of Christ crucified and resurrected. “I follow Paul,” “I follow Apollos,” and so on. In the same way, today’s Church, particularly within Evangelicalism, often sees its identity defined by the latest conference speaker or theological trend rather than by the enduring, communal practices that have shaped the Church for centuries. This fragmented identity undermines the unity of the Body and distracts from the deeper work of discipleship that the Church is called to, and priestly pastoring pastors are required to be responsible for.
So, the result of such a fragmented spirituality is a people who are constantly looking for the next big thing, never settling into the life of the Church or the deep transformation that comes from sustained, communal practices. In this environment, the Church loses its witness to the world as a united people, deeply rooted in Christ, whose identity is found in the shared life of worship, fellowship, and mission. Here, (another observation) I should add also that we have too many competing Church brands in one larger community creating this as well. So, in all this, we present a fractured and disoriented version of Christianity that is more concerned with individual expression and personal branding than with faithful, communal living.
Ultimately, for a start what we need is a return to intentional practices that form and shape the people of God, rooted not in marketing strategies or fleeting trends but in the eternal rhythms of Scripture, liturgy, and sacrament that have long marked the life of the faithful. Only then will we begin to live into our true identity as the Body of Christ, one in Him, united in faith and love, and committed to the renewal of the world through His gospel.
When Paul went out on his mission, he saw himself as proclaiming the arrival of a new polis (a new community) under a new Kurios (Lord). This vision is evident in his anger with Peter in Galatians 2, where Peter’s segregation of the Lord’s Table between Jew and Gentile contradicted the unified nature of the Gospel. It’s the same vision that underlies Paul’s description of the Church in Ephesians 3:10 as the display of God’s wisdom in the Church, unified but variegated- many but one. Paul’s declarations of “one faith, one Lord, one baptism” and his emphasis on the unity of the Church through “one loaf” all point to the reality of this new, unified community. I think the Fathers understood this especially well in their work as they reflected on this and how God established community around the Temple and those strict liturgical practices - and we are that Temple.